Strindberg the Man/Chapter 4

IN his endeavor to obtain more knowledge and new forms of artistic expression, Strindberg always followed the highest precedents.

The name which he most often pronounced when people spoke to him about art and learning, was that of Goethe. To judge by what he said about the German Olympian, it seems that secretly he had chosen him as his special ideal and that he always endeavored to test himself and to judge himself through a comparison with Goethe.

Whenever there was a period in Strindberg's life when for one reason or another he could not busy his restless brain with writing, impetuously and with great energy he delved into studies of various kinds. As a young library clerk he studied Swedish history and the Chinese language. During his sojourn in Switzerland he was occupied principally with modern sociology. At the beginning of his second long exile, when he stayed with Ola Hansson^[1] in Friedrichshagen and later on in Berlin, the exact sciences and modern natural sciences claimed his attention.

When I found Strindberg in a dark, half-furnished studio in Ola Hansson's little cottage in Friedrichshagen ​near Berlin about two years after I had met him in Gothenburg, it was not the poet Strindberg that received me, but rather the man of scientific research.

He had spent a couple of very unpleasant years in the vicinity of Stockholm. His large book about Sweden's Natural Sceneries he had not finished. He had had to go through the long painful proceedings of divorce from his first wife. He had passed most of his time in the skerries, had written some of his short, masterly one-act plays, he had painted a large number of pictures—so many that he might have arranged a separate exhibition— and he had described his first conjugal inferno in A Fool's Confession.

These two years of suffering and poverty played an important part in Strindberg's life. Doubtless they laid the foundation for that state of excessive irritability which paved the way for the great Inferno-period a few years later. If these years had not been so hard, Strindberg's career after 1892 might have become entirely different from what it was.

When Strindberg went into exile this time, he thought it was for the last time. During the voyage from Stockholm to Stettin, the steamer was followed by a huge dark-blue tidal wave, which he later on reproduced in colors, and this indefatigable pursuer he regarded as an omen that he must keep away from his ungrateful countrymen.

When I first met him in Friedrichshagen, he had the appearance of a man who finally could breathe again after a long confinement in a hospital.

​He asserted that with A Fool's Confession he had said his last word as a story-writer—how many last words has he not said since? He had arrived at that meridian in life when a man has a very good reason to sit down in the easy chair and rest while thinking over what life has been and what the future may have in store.

His quill of belles lettres he had thrown away; but one thing still retained his interest in life: late years had seen the birth of a movement of great scientific activity accompanied by a great many new results. Into these he wished to penetrate in order to ascertain whether he could find what he sought. With a proud gesture he pointed at two large piles of unbound scientific works which he had piled up against the wall. He had bought them with the first money he had received on German soil. But he had made up his mind that he could not afford a bookshelf.

Consequently his studio in Friedrichshagen was not very inviting. Besides the scientific books there was an old easel which looked like a dirt-brown skeleton. Over by the window to be sure there was a table, but it looked as though it was not in use. There lay upon it a couple of uncut books, also pen and ink, but no paper piled up in stacks of manuscripts, nor notes with which Strindberg usually busied himself so persistently.

In the back-ground of the room he had arranged his little “salon” with a drawing-room table, a few antique arm-chairs and a lounge. In one of the arm-chairs Ola Hansson sat in silence the whole evening while Strindberg and I engaged in conversation.

​The long seclusion in the skerries had made Strindberg more taciturn than he usually was. It was difficult to get under way a conversation that might carry him along. He did not wish to discuss the subject of belles lettres; he thought the subject was below his dignity. I tried to tell about Herman Gorter's new literary achievements and about Walt Whitman, the great American author,—the two new planets about which my life revolved during these two years.

But Strindberg cared for neither of them. It interested him far more to hear about the red Indians with whom I had come in contact the year before out there in the wild west. An individual with much of the primitive man in him as he was, he seems always to have sympathized with these tactitum, mystic people of the wilds, and this in spite of the fact that it was not until towards the end of his life that he thought he had made the interesting discovery that the Indians probably were descendants of the Phoenicians and that Indian word-roots are of a purely Hebrew and Greek origin.

What at this time was of particular interest to him as regards the Indians was whether their reticence in the council was a sign of concentrated mental activity or its very opposite. He suddenly asked me if I had not ascertained this while I was among them.

Of course I had not made any direct inquiries of the kind since I was not aware of the fact that this was an unexplored field. But to judge by what I had seen of Indians, I had been able to come to the conclusion that they have the power of thinking so secretly ​that one cannot by any signs whatsoever divine their thoughts. Furthermore, I had found that when they talk, they express themselves with such concentration and by means of images of such poetic coloring that they give you the impression of refined thinkers. On these two grounds I thought it safe to assure Strindberg that the great, mystic silence of the Indians could not be due to inactivity of the brain. This seemed to please him, although I am not certain that he was fully convinced.

I told him also of a success he had had out there in unliterary U. S. A. Popular among the Swedes he was not, of course, since they are all church-people as a rule, church-goers of the most narrow-minded kind—and as such void of all understanding of every kind of critique of the existing order of things. After having read Strindberg's The Red Room, the majority of those whom I met had received the impression that Strindberg was a dangerous anarchist, and they had made up their minds not to read another line from his pen. Even the Swedish-American Singing Societies, which toured Sweden a year or two before Strindberg's death, disowned him and refused to give a red cent to the national fund which was started at that time in order that the officially disowned poet might be given a Nobel-Prize by the Swedish people.

All the more wonderful it is, therefore, that one of Strindberg's works that was least popular at home, The Swedish People at Home, had scored a great success that very year among the exiles in America. It was the founder and former editor of the weekly paper called ​The Viking, who had settled down in Chicago, to whom we are indebted for this.

Out there he went by the name of Mr. Strand, and he had undertaken to print the entire work and to reproduce the illustrations. The enterprise was such a success that The Swedish People at Home next to the Bible was the most popular book in the Swedish language in the United States of America. The publisher had made a net gain of $20,000 on Strindberg, and when I told him that the author was somewhere in the skerries outside of Stockholm in a most destitute condition, Mr. Strand declared that he wanted to send Strindberg a royalty of $2000, if he only could get his address.

After our meeting in Friedrichshagen we wrote, both Strindberg and myself, to Strand with reference to the royalty, which would have come in very handy for Strindberg at that time. But we never received an answer, and according to what I learned later on Strand lost every cent he had made on Strindberg, when he tried to publish a second work of the author.

As usual we discussed that evening everything between heaven and earth. The strongest impression that I received of Strindberg at that time, was his joy at having broken off all relations with belles lettres. It seemed as if this sort of authorship had fagged him out entirely—he had, shortly before, performed such a volitional tour de force as A Fool's Confession—as though he had been quite tired out with this groping in space to which poetic activity is so conducive.

Now, having entered the province of science, he felt ​that he was on firm ground. He rejoiced with the enthusiasm of a child because the subjects with which he was to occupy himself were so evident that there could be no further reasons for doubt. He no longer wished to be the everlasting skeptic, the never-ceasing wrecker of the status quo. Now the work of clearing had been performed and he considered the time of reconstruction to be at hand.

His miscalculations were of a most serious nature. He delved into the exact sciences, but everywhere he came across great blanks, which he could not call exact. This caused a break with the natural sciences in general, and from having been a simple-hearted, naïve believer, he became in this province also the revolutionary Loke.

Three years afterwards he bursts out in his Sylva Sylvarum: “A generation that has had the courage to dethrone God the Father, to tear down the state, the church, the commonwealth, and morals, still bows before the sciences. But in the sciences where liberty ought to rule, the pass-word is: Believe in the authorities or die! A pillar of the Bastille had not yet been raised in Paris on the spot where the former Sorbonne was situated, and the cross still dominated the Pantheon and the cupola of the Institute.

“There was, therefore, nothing more to do in the world, and feeling that I was superfluous, I determined to disappear.”

Thus Strindberg's endeavor to find something exact ​and stable to cling to resulted in a fit of despair which almost led to suicide.

His arrival in Germany this time took place at a most inopportune moment and under the most unfavorable conditions. If the author—so speaks the German enthusiastic Strindberg scholar, Hermann Esswein—like young Schillar had found a Weimar among us, that element in him which alone could have brought poise and calm into his life and thus cleansed his spirit of all inclinations to extremes, would undoubtedly have increased in strength and perhaps even conquered in the end.

“But Strindberg found no Weimar, only modem Berlin. He found no aesthetic-philosophic spiritual culture that could inspire confidence, but a roaring, seething chaos of efforts and onsets in every direction and all that childishly wild, shallow spirituality, void of perspective, which always foams up as soon as new fields are opened for materialistic culture or exploitation.”

Instead of finding the new syntheses which modern science had been able to produce during the latter decades, Strindberg at that time came across the fundamental preparatory works, a lot of details that had not as yet been systematically arranged. He only found the foundations, but no temples upon them, and it was this that so deeply embittered him, who came with all his strong religiosity prepared to embrace the new rationalism.

It was a new Red Room period which he passed through during this stay in Berlin. But it was entirely different from that period of his youth in which he fought ​bureaucracy with Berns Salonger^[2] as rendez-vous. Already the name At the Sign of the Black Pig symbolizes this Berlin sojourn. In the little wine room in The Sign of the Black Pig at the corner of Unter den Linden and Potsdamerstrasse, where Strindberg passed the evenings that winter, the questions of the day were discussed, and everything that seemed in the least antiquated became the object of sharp attacks.

Among the friends with whom Strindberg associated there and who seem to have had some influence on him, the most important was the Polish author Stanislaw Przybyszewski whom Strindberg in Inferno (pp. 66—67) calls “my friend, my disciple who called me ‘father’, because he had learned of me, my Famulus, who gave me the name of master and kissed my hands because his life began where mine ended.”

Of none of his literary friends have I heard Strindberg speak with such enthusiasm as of this Stachu (an abbreviation of Stanislaw). In the beginning of their acquaintance, Strindberg spoke of him as a universal genius and called him “the great Pole”. But Stachu belonged to those all-embracing minds who try to encompass so much that no systems suffice, and whose sphere of thought—except within well-arranged special fields—is a never-ceasing, billowing chaos.

Besides this, Stachu was one of those who have a need of deadening the increasing Weltschmerz with continual ​Dionysian orgies. In his despair over the negative results to which he had come, we can easily imagine how natural it would be for Strindberg to enter into the spirit of those wine-nights in the little café with the unattractive name.

In order to have something wherewith to counteract the romantic Pole, Strindberg engaged a couple of scientific assistants at this time who served him in the capacity of controllers—when they were allowed to do so, which was not always the case—with reference to those discoveries of “scientific mistakes” or “exact lies” which Strindberg made from time to time.

Despite the fact that Strindberg now had renounced his artistic activities, he showed himself in all his artistic glory in these scientific investigations. He did not study the sciences in the same manner as the sponge-brains at our universities who absorb mechanically; on the contrary, he reacted against everything, added up his suspicions until he had quite a batch, and when he had several such blocks ready, he began to make his syntheses sometimes based on a real blunder and thus leading nowhere, but on other occasions bringing results which were reached intuitively and proved to be of real value.

It must be granted that what Strindberg accomplished was not scientific achievement in the strict sense of the word. But time and time again, he raised questions of such surprising ingenuity that the ordinary servants of the Temple of the Sciences probably would not have hit upon them for a long time, had they not had this original forerunner.

​When the professional men of science referred to Strindberg's extraordinary imaginative faculty, just as though that faculty was responsible for his going astray, he met them with the words of the great English scientist, Tyndall: “Without the imaginative faculty we cannot proceed a single step beyond the purely animal world, perhaps not even reach the boundaries of the animal world.”

This power of imagination which is just as indispensable to the searching scientist—the great mark of differentiation between him and the scientific collector—as it is to the poet and the painter, this power Strindberg could not shut out in spite of every resolution. He remained a poet not only in his scientific works, but in this way he even came to compose scientific novels and sagas and thus created the most hypermodern genre which has been produced by any of the contemporary poets.

As an example of this kind of literary production, I will cite only some of the more sensational, such as his: The Deadhead Butterfly, in which the scientist sings a hymn to immortality, The Alpine Violet, in which he demonstrates how nature herself breaks up all systems, The Bridal Night of the Crickets, in which he makes chemistry itself arrange a tragi-comedy in a tumbler full of water.

Strindberg, however, had entirely different inner needs which could not be appeased by the soulless materialism that was the fashion at the time. These needs drove him ​step by step over the great rubbish-heap of the occult sciences, and finally brought about that catastrophe which precipitated him into his life's deepest Inferno.

But before Strindberg got there, he had committed another great folly. Tired of the bachelor's life he had been leading he became desirous of once more casting in his lot with that of a young woman. This time it was a girl whom he met by chance in the literary coterie of which he was an associate.

It was love at first sight that attracted them to one another. But Strindberg scarcely seemed to be acquainted with this little Frida Uhl who before long—when insanity threatened him—became his “pretty jailer”. Neither in what he said nor in what he wrote about her, can we form an estimate of the young woman.

She got him away from the wild bacchanalian nights, however. As she was a woman of the world, she did not wish to see her betrothed in the somewhat rustic wardrobes that Strindberg had brought with him from the skerries. She compelled him to buy modern clothes in Berlin.

One day artloving Berlin saw the serious man of research, August Strindberg, and the charming Fräulein Frida Uhl coming up to the National Gallery of Art on a sort of exhibition trip. Strindberg had jammed himself into the traditional apparel of an extreme Berlin dandy: Suit of a large-checkered material with large cuffs on the pantaloons, a short yellowish-gray top-coat, a loud necktie, a cane of exaggerated size and a well-polished ​silk hat which hardly could be induced to remain on Strindberg's fluffy lion's mane!

Shortly afterwards both disappeared from Berlin. They had started on their honeymoon to Heligoland and Gravesend.